An elementary school in rural Louisiana isn’t Rahm Emanuel’s natural habitat. The blunt-spoken political insider is better known for scorching the earth and disturbing the peace to achieve his aims from power perches in the West Wing, on Capitol Hill, in Chicago City Hall. He infamously once mailed a dead fish to a pollster who upset him. While serving as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, he for a time kept a nameplate in his office — a gift from his brothers, Ari, a Hollywood power broker, and Ezekiel, an oncologist — that read, “Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself.”
Yet here he is one afternoon in early October, sauntering into LeBlanc Elementary School, a low building set amid the sugarcane fields and cow pastures of Vermilion Parish, 150 miles west of New Orleans. It’s a French immersion school in one of the most French-speaking places in the state. He visits a first grade classroom where native English speakers are describing their favorite animals in what sounds to Emanuel like pretty good French. “I really feel stupid,” he says.
Emanuel’s two-day swing through New Orleans and points west is part of his aggressive public flirtation with running for president in 2028. He will likely announce a decision early in 2027, according to a person familiar with his thinking. If he does run — and people who know him say he’s laser-focused on the possibility — there is little chance that in a general election he would carry Vermilion Parish, which President Donald Trump won with about 80% of the vote all three times he was on the ballot. Superintendent Tommy Byler welcomes the potential candidate and two journalists — a reporter from The Acadiana Advocate and me — while making clear this visit should remain nonpartisan. “Zero politics,” Emanuel promises. “Correct,” replies Byler.
Sorry, superintendent. Mais bien sûr this visit is all about the political performance art Emanuel is practicing during a pre-presidential walkabout that has taken him across the country and beyond. Abbeville, Louisiana. Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Houston, Texas. Benton Harbor, Michigan. Reno, Nevada. La Crosse, Wisconsin. Omaha, Nebraska. Tel Aviv, Israel. And more.
From each unlikely locale, Emanuel all but shouts, Look at me! — seemingly oblivious to the fact that this does not, at least on the surface, appear to be the right moment for Rahm Emanuel to run for president. The Democratic Party is in populist revolt against D.C. insiders, but Emanuel is a consummate D.C. insider. Voters increasingly devalue expertise and experience, but Emanuel has been shaping policy at the country’s highest levels since the early 1990s. People on both the left and the right seem to loathe centrists right now, but Emanuel’s entire brand is rooted in pragmatism, triangulation and, well, centrism.
“It’s a very anti-establishment moment and Rahm has one of the longest political résumés possible,” says Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a watchdog group tracking corporate influence in Washington. “I don’t think that’s what voters are responding to. They are seeking outsiders, and he is the opposite of an outsider.” Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich put it this way on Substack in September: “Rahm Emanuel represents everything that’s been wrong about the Democratic Party for the last 34 years.”
And yet Emanuel is, in other ways, very of-the-moment. Temperamentally, he is the kind of candidate many Americans have found themselves voting for in recent years: a caustic, self-certain brawler; an authentically entertaining character who — not unlike a certain current president — is famously comfortable in his own obstreperous skin.
“Your industry, in all due respect, sucks,” Emanuel, 66, tells me the day before his appearance at LeBlanc Elementary, when I float my evolving thoughts about how he fits with the political mood of America. We’re in a coffee shop in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, and people are starting to listen. When he gets excited or irritated, like right now, his eyes bulge, and the lean hollows of his face fill in. Soon he is off on a rant about “the quote-unquote left.” “What are they doing? They’re flipping blue districts to blue. Wow, really impressive, okay?” He describes his recent campaigning for Democrats seeking to capture Republican seats in the midterm elections in Nebraska, New Jersey, Florida, Minnesota and Wisconsin. “Now, you tell me: If you flip [a] district from blue to cobalt blue, and you don’t flip Omaha, how much of a minimum wage [increase] that the middle class, the working class, is relying on are you getting passed? I’m not impressed, okay?”
Our conversations continued over two days, during breaks in his frantic dash from school to school in Louisiana. I was “Mr. Montgomery” when he didn’t like the drift of a question and “David” when, apparently, he did.
Beyond reminding voters (and reporters) of his disposition as a fighter, Emanuel is also presenting himself as someone on the cutting edge of policy. The reason for showing up in Louisiana, as with his trip to Mississippi in January, was because of both states’ remarkable recent success at raising test scores in reading and math. Throughout the trip, he bubbled with proposals — and not just about schools. On stage before an audience of educators at one stop, he digressed into a rapid-fire burst of plans to attack Washington corruption and increase worker pay. And his ideas and energies are not limited to domestic politics. At Tel Aviv University in July, Emanuel, a practicing Jew, gave a headline-generating speech criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and urging a new approach to achieve Israeli security and Palestinian sovereignty. “If you’re trying to do something conventional,” he tells me, “you don’t go to Louisiana, you don’t go to Mississippi, you don’t go to Tel Aviv.”
Can a politician who is undeniably from the distant past also plausibly claim to represent the current drift of American politics and policy — or even the future? Emanuel appears determined to find out. “I don’t think he’s running a nostalgia campaign here,” David Axelrod, who served with Emanuel in the Obama administration, told me. “He’s throwing out ideas about the future, and people need to decide whether that experience gives him a perspective and an ability to drive those ideas forward.”
***
In a parallel universe, Emanuel might have spent his days sitting on a mat sorting shapes with toddlers. After growing up in the Chicago area, a son of a pediatrician and a politically active nurse-social worker, he went to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and studied early-childhood education. He was a teaching assistant in the college’s early-childhood learning center. “I would not recommend any of your children spending quality time with me,” he advised administrators during a visit to Wilcox Academy of Early Learning in New Orleans.
He changed course after a summer job with the public interest group Common Cause. “I realized: You know what, this is what you’re interested in,” he told me. “It was just a moment of discovery” about what his career could be. He started working on campaigns and developing prowess as an arm-twisting political fundraiser. In the fall of 1991, Bill Clinton recruited him to become the finance director for his cash-strapped presidential campaign. Rahm’s older brother, Ezekiel, sat in on their meeting in Brookline, Massachusetts, and heard Clinton outline his plan “to appeal to a segment of the electorate — white, male, rural, conservative — that the party had trouble attracting,” according to Ezekiel’s book “Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family.” “Rahm recognized the strength of this strategy, which combined the liberal-leaning politics he favored with a somewhat more conservative approach to issues like welfare reform.”
A raging moderate was being born. As assistant to Clinton for political affairs and then senior adviser over nearly six years in the White House, Emanuel had a hand in the president’s policy achievements, including ones that have aged well in the eyes of liberal Democrats (providing health insurance to millions of uninsured children, banning assault weapons) and others that have not (NAFTA, welfare reform).
After a couple of years away from politics to make money as an investment banker, Emanuel took his pugnacious centrism to Congress, representing Chicago, where he added another hue to the political identity he now likes to project: electoral tactician. As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he oversaw the party’s gain of 31 seats in the House in 2006, leading to Nancy Pelosi’s election as speaker. He rose to No. 4 in the leadership hierarchy and was reelected to a fourth term, but left the seat to serve as Obama’s first chief of staff.
Passing the Affordable Care Act was the administration’s signature achievement during Emanuel’s nearly two years in the job. Now, on the pre-campaign trail, he takes credit for helping to muscle it through Congress. Yet progressive critics will point out that on the day the Supreme Court upheld the law in 2012, Emanuel acknowledged he had warned Obama about the political consequences of going all in on health care. “I told him many times [about] the political cost of doing this,” Emanuel said to reporters that day. “And thank God for the rest of the country, he didn’t listen to me.”
I ask him about this over a bowl of gumbo in Vermilion Parish. His answer is a glimpse into what drives the left crazy about Rahm Emanuel. He describes a Saturday meeting early in the administration to which the president had summoned his domestic policy, economic and political teams. They discussed which of Obama’s “three children” — health care reform, financial reform, cap-and-trade carbon emissions policy — to tackle first. Emanuel says he favored financial reform because a bipartisan swath of the country hungered for some “Old Testament justice” to be wrought upon the bankers and insurance executives they blamed for the Great Recession. It would be good politics. But the boss chose health care, and the chief of staff worked to get it done. Later in the process, when Obamacare seemed on life support, the president wanted to see options, Emanuel says. He drew up a narrower plan that would have insured fewer people. Obama rejected it.
Obamacare — including its revolutionary protection of people with preexisting health conditions — became law. Even today, Emanuel seems torn between pride in the accomplishment and recognition that this progressive triumph carried political costs. “You do get preexisting condition. You get it done,” he told me. “You also get the tea party” surge in the 2010 midterms, washing away all the Democratic gains of 2006 and more. “And I would like to argue that the tea party’s done some damage to the body politic.” Sometimes “there’s no good choices,” he continued. “As chief of staff, or as a president, or a mayor, you have to think. It’s not a linear line. Maybe you wouldn’t have lost the Senate [in 2014]. Maybe you’d have gotten a Supreme Court nominee. There’s a lot of ways this ball bounces, contrary to some gossiping special interest in D.C. on K Street who’s never run a race or passed a piece of legislation.”
Emanuel left the White House in 2010 to run for mayor of Chicago. After taking office the following year, education became one of his priorities. As he never tires of repeating, during his tenure Chicago schoolchildren posted faster growth in reading ability from third to eighth grade than nearly any other school system in the country, according to a 2017 analysis by Stanford University researchers. His administration also lengthened the school day by more than an hour from one of the shortest in the nation; added universal full-day kindergarten and pre-K; raised high school graduation rates; gained a more favorable funding formula from the state; offered free community college to high school graduates with B averages; and had nearly all graduates produce a letter of acceptance to a college, a vocational school or the armed forces before receiving their diplomas. As he described it to education leaders in New Orleans: “You will not walk on graduation day until you tell us where you’re walking to.”
But there’s another side to his education record that he talks less about. In his first term, Emanuel unilaterally revoked a 4% teacher pay raise, poisoning relations with the union and provoking a strike. He also oversaw the closing of about 50 schools, primarily in Black neighborhoods. Activists and parents in one neighborhood launched a hunger strike to try to keep their high school. The purpose of the closures was to save money, but critics say any savings were less than promised and the move destabilized neighborhoods, with the impact still being felt now.
“What we saw with DOGE in D.C. is what we have experienced here with the Chicago public schools under his leadership,” says Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, who was the union’s political director when Emanuel was mayor. “Black women [educators] were laid off. Black women were downsized because of privatized options.” She scoffs at his efforts to take credit for the improvements in Chicago schools. “For him to tout his leadership when my members do the work, it feels like he is turning in someone else’s homework.”
Emanuel told me he regrets how he handled his initial relations with the union president, the late Karen Lewis. The pay cut landed almost without warning. “She woke up in the morning to the press conference. So I put her back against the wall. And it sets off hand-to-hand combat for my first term,” he says. “I made mistakes, but I learned from them, and that’s the only thing that matters.” Upon his reelection, he says, as a token of peace and respect, his first phone call was to the teachers union president.
The drama with the schools unfolded alongside the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager who was shot 16 times by a white police officer. Protests intensified when the city released video more than a year later showing McDonald being shot as he was moving away. Emanuel dismissed the police superintendent and said at the time he hadn’t seen the video during the months it was withheld as evidence in the investigation. As he neared the end of his second term in 2018, he announced he would not seek reelection. He went on to serve in President Joe Biden’s administration as ambassador to Japan, though progressives tried to stop his appointment. Back in Chicago, Brandon Johnson, a former social studies teacher and union organizer who had been one of the hunger strikers during the school-closure controversy, was elected mayor in 2023.
***
It’s mid-morning at the pre-K through eighth grade Phillis Wheatley Community School in New Orleans. Seated at a long table in the library with leaders of the school and of the city’s unique post-Hurricane Katrina education system — a diminished teachers union, neighborhood schools largely replaced by citywide independent charter schools — Emanuel seems about to disappear altogether into the weeds of education policy. I can tell he loves it.
“What has worked on reading?” he asks. “I have some theories, but I want to hear about it. What has worked on math specifically? How’d you get attendance [to 95 percent]? And what would be, now that you look back and you want to be honest with yourselves, this is what failed, you learned from those mistakes, this was what succeeded, and this is what, if I was to do it over again, I would do?”
Louisiana distinguishes itself as the only state where students in grades three through eight have returned to prepandemic scores in both reading and math, according to researchers at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth. Louisiana’s fourth graders ranked 50th in the nation for reading in 2019 and reached 16th by 2024.
Education is one of the policy areas where Emanuel is already flooding the zone with ideas like a declared candidate. “I should not be the only person coming to Louisiana,” he tells me that afternoon in the coffee shop. “The president of the United States, the Governors Association, the Mayors Association should be coming to Louisiana. I think it’s a condemnation of our elected political leaders of both parties, a failed status quo, who have allowed failure to be adopted as the norm.” He adds: “The president every day talks to [Secretary of the Interior] Doug Burgum about arches and ballrooms. I’m going to be talking every day to the secretary of education, okay? And guess what? When presidents shine a light on something, it seems to have everybody sit up at attention.”
The educators Emanuel meets in the four schools and the career training center he visits during his time in Louisiana sound pleased and surprised that a national political figure is making a plausible demonstration of caring about the granular details of their profession. “So much of what makes education great isn’t going to happen overnight,” says Jerel Bryant, CEO of Collegiate Academies, which operates several public high schools in New Orleans. “To say that you’re invested in that also means that you’re invested in something beyond your political mortality.”
The next morning, former Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a conservative Democrat who carried the state twice, joins Emanuel at Wilcox Academy. “I would personally be excited by a Rahm Emanuel candidacy if that’s what he chooses to do,” Edwards tells me, stopping short of an endorsement. “If you look at what he’s saying across all the issues, by and large, he’s staying between the 40-yard lines. And I think that’s where so many voters in the country are. That’s also how you build durable solutions to our problems.”
Playing between the 40-yard lines, of course, is precisely where Emanuel appears to be out of step with the current energy in the Democratic Party — and proudly so. In a July column in The Wall Street Journal, he accused the “Bernie Bros” and the Democratic Socialists of America of threatening to limit his party’s potential gains in the midterm elections.
Bernie Sanders fired back on “Face the Nation”: “There is a strong division within the Democratic Party. You have an establishment like Rahm Emanuel, who are dependent on billionaire campaign contributors and want to maintain the status quo. Then you have a progressive movement, which, by the way, what is getting these guys nervous is we are winning all over this country.”
But if Emanuel is out of step with the party’s ideological shift, it’s possible he makes up for it in other ways. “The notion of moderate Democrats, that they’re not fighters, well, he turns that on its head,” says Jim Kessler, co-founder of Third Way, a Washington-based think tank that works to invigorate the ideological middle of the Democratic Party. “He is absolutely unafraid, and he’s out there with ideas and rhetoric that slays sacred cows.”
Kessler uses the phrase “combative centrists” to describe the kind of moderates who can appeal to voters today. Emanuel isn’t the only candidate who fits this bill, Kessler says, yet he also points out that Emanuel “has a superpower in this race that no other candidate has, which is: He’s not dying to be loved by everybody. … That gives him something, a tool, that most people running for office aren’t able to deploy.”
Centrists also sometimes suffer from the perception that they lack policy ambition, but it’s tough to tag Emanuel with that criticism. One of the lessons he says he learned from Bill Clinton is that in politics, ideas matter. The smorgasbord of proposals he has laid out in various appearances and social media posts includes banning social media for children younger than 16; raising the federal minimum wage to $20 an hour by 2030; transferring $8 billion from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention budget to community colleges; incentivizing colleges to offer free tuition for households under $200,000 and cap tuition increases at inflation for wealthier households; making elected officials and judges in all three branches of government retire at 75; forbidding stock trading or participation in prediction markets across all three branches; requiring blind trusts for anyone in federal service with more than $1 million; and imposing a two-year moratorium after federal service on making money from foreign governments, which Emanuel calls “the Kushner rule.”
Emanuel says the Democratic Party in recent years has become “intellectually flabby.” Catching a lift in the black SUV that has been shepherding him around Louisiana, I ask him what he means. “Let me take education,” he says. In the Obama years, he asserts, Democrats had about an 18-point advantage in polls on education. In postpandemic stimulus spending under Biden, more than $100 billion was allocated to schools. “It’s massive. Big number. You’re a smart guy. Name me the policy associated with it.” I can’t. He leans his face close to mine and purrs: “Intellectually flaaaa-beeee. And guess what? Post-COVID, [Democrats] go down to zero advantage on education.” Then he mentions today’s affordable housing crisis. “Tell me everybody’s plan. [Democrats] don’t have a plan. … Flabby.”
Presenting himself as a font of ideas seems to be a way for Emanuel to define his potential candidacy as one that would lean into the future, regardless of his ties to the past. “There are a hell of a lot more people talking about him now seriously in the context of this race than were a year ago, because he has been so vigorous in throwing ideas out there and engaging in the debate and pushing the debate in a way that almost nobody has been,” Axelrod told me.
Those ideas, however, may never find an audience if Emanuel can’t get voters to look beyond the ways his résumé makes him a throwback. “I think Rahm is seen as Washington, even though he spent [three] years in Japan and he was mayor for eight years,” says Kessler. “The Rahm that is the non-Washington Rahm will have to rise.”
***
Back at the coffee shop, I remind Emanuel of something he said about candidate recruitment in “HouseQuake,” a 2009 documentary about the Democrats’ 2006 takeover of the House: “If people were angry at Washington,” he told the filmmakers, “you didn’t want somebody who came from Washington, or was a career politician.”
I haven’t even fully formulated my question when he sees where I’m going — and pounces. “Mr. Montgomery. First of all — ” “You can go with David, please.” “No, but Mr. Montgomery, I would beg that Tokyo and Chicago are not Washington.”
It’s true that Emanuel’s duty station hasn’t been in the nation’s capital since he left the Obama White House in 2010. But I’m thinking of Kessler’s point: Washington is where his reputation was forged.
“You show me where I said, ’You know what, I think the status quo is great,’ ” Emanuel continues. “There are some people that don’t spend political capital. I’m kind of reckless. If you wanted to do what makes you popular, would you take on a failed school system? Would you take on a failed health care system? ... From the NRA, to the insurance companies, to the banking industry, to the educational bureaucracy, I have taken on the most hardened pieces of crap and beaten the living hell out of them. With results to show for it.”
He pokes the wood-paneled wall next to our table for emphasis. “So I agree there’s a hatred of Washington, which is exactly what got me into politics. And immediately as soon as we brought that change to Washington [in 2006], the first thing that happened? Minimum wage increase. So I have never, ever accepted a failed status quo. If anything, I’ve been reckless in taking on too many fights.”
It’s easy to see all the scenarios in which Emanuel’s candidacy simply fails to take off. But after my time with him, I could also tell that he’s in touch — in ways that are not yet fully appreciated — with a basic anger and yearning in today’s Democratic psyche. Pollsters tend to portray voters who want change as the opposite of those who value experience, and right now Democratic voters fall heavily on the side of change. As he makes the rounds, Emanuel is working out the political jujitsu it would take to unite the two. His candidacy would be an argument that durable change depends on practical experience, turbocharged with the combustible drive to make it happen.
At a town hall one evening in the New Orleans Career Center, Nolan Marshall Jr., a member of the Orleans Parish School Board, was sitting in the front row. He told Emanuel that he already had his vote. But Marshall still wanted to know: “How are you going to win?” Emanuel’s answer jumped from his record as a political victor to his commitment to education to his plans to fight corrupt pro-Trump corporate kowtowing, then back to education. To me, though, one line stood out: In the next election, he said, “I think candor and authenticity are going to have a premium higher than normal.”
Authenticity is so prized in American politics that politicians will try to fake it. They’ll put on flannel shirts and ball caps, drop their g’s, gorge on the local fried delicacies. Emanuel couldn’t fake it if he wanted to. He doesn’t have to. The question is: Can Unvarnished Rahm redeem Washington Rahm? “I’m not gray,” he told me earlier in the day. “I come in living color. And when I think there’s a moral wrong, I am an S-O-B.”
David Montgomery is a freelance journalist and former staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine.
More Perspectives:
Dana Milbank: No Attack Is Too Vile for JD Vance
Matt K. Lewis: Mike Johnson Really Needs to Stop Insisting the Polls Are Wrong
Robin Givhan: Stop Belittling Kamala Harris
Forum: They Ran for Congress. They Lost. What Have They Learned?